I was sitting at work this week and someone told me about this very easy to find waterfall that was up on Stevens Pass.

Now I’ve played the “I’m going looking for a waterfall game” before (read some of my earlier blogs.  And your see that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.  Usually you spend a few hours stomping through heavily wooded areas that are covered in overgrown sharp stuff that hurts your legs.  If you are lucky you eventually find “the waterfall” (well actually if you keep looking you find a waterfall, it might not be the one you are looking for) and usually (for me) it’s a disappointment.

So the idea of “easily” finding one of these bad boys got me all excited.

Stevens Pass is one of the mountain passes through the Cascade range in Western Washington.  The pass is about 90 minutes from my house so I figured I’d go out and see what I could find.

As is usually the case it took a little while, but it was all driving.  In fact when I finally found the waterfall, I nearly drove past it as it was pretty small.  But find it I did and walked about 2 feet from the car to get this shot.

This picture was taken on the tripod with a ten stop neutral density filter on my wide angle lens.  This stops light entering the camera so the camera has to keep the shutter open for a long time to get an accurate exposure.  Long shutters make flowing water look like ribbons and produces shots like the one below.  As the shutter was open for around 30 seconds, the camera has to remain on a tripod so there is no camera shake – which results in a blurry picture.

The only downside of long exposures – especially when you are shooting a scene like this, is that any wind makes tree branches move and they look blurry in the picture.  Luckily for me this waterfall was totally sheltered from the wind and it wasn’t a problem.

I literally drove for 90 minutes.  Got out of the car, took this picture and headed home 🙂

On the way home I passed this truck in Sultan and couldn’t resist shooting that too.  The whole trip took just over three hours and I got two nice pics.